re: cruise control. while it may have one, if she is actually in motion, her right calf is on the throttle, and by sliding her leg slightly forward and back can roll off and on the throttle as desired. @ NOTDilbert, re: spokes. mag wheels are a distinct possibility. whether or not the bike is in motion, only Paul knows…

Of course, that’s a Really Stupid Design – the amount of trail that that fork geometry creats is going to make it Hard To Steer … and the drive to the rear wheel is by a friction wheel that runs on the center of the tire.

Not only would i not trust that arrangement in the slightest bit of wet, it’ll wear out tires fast – not the visible wear along the centerline of the tire.

And i’m not sure how well it would handle hard braking.

NOT something to actually ride much/hard, i would think. (Of course, i could be wrong, since i don’t ride motorcycles.)

I’m guessing solid aluminum wheels. Most big cruiser bikes have some variation of them nowadays. No visible kickstand so I’d say Shelly’s holding it up with her left foot braced against the wall, which, along with the rest of the background, has been blanked out. Artistic liscence and all that.

*sigh* i keep seeing this motorbike-thing (not sure if its a proper bike but looks like one) in a shop when my bus goes past it.
i cant ride a bike
dont know anyone who can ride a bike
but its soo pretty i wants it 😀

(loves looking at motorbikes – and fast cars sometimes..even if i have no wish to buy the fast cars…barring the odd one which look soo georgous…)

You know why he had three? Because older Nortons were notorious for needing re-tightening&re-servicing everything after 100 miles… Gets old after a while ,so it’s handy to have a replacement available 😆

Speaking about suicide shifts and double-clutching – i can’t find a copy online, but Gil Shelton, who was obviously as much of a motorhead as he was an underground cartoonist, did a strip in which Fat Freddy decided to buy a chopper.

Well, the lot had a suicide-shift Harley chopper that was owned by a little old lady Hell’s Angel who only rode it to church on Sundays, and invited Fat Freddy to take a test ride.

All was going well until he came to a red light and discovered that there was something wrong, and it wouldn’t go into neutral.

Which meant that he couldn’t take his foot off the clutch.

“Which means,” he said to himself, that if it decided to start to tip the wrong way…

Which, of course, it does.

Following which there is a panel showing a large dust cloud like a comic-strip fight, with arms, legs, wheels and the like sticking out in various directions…

I had a 1980 Superglide with the stock buckhorn handlebars. I made a short trip (30 miles) and back and my back was killing me. Shortly after that I traded someone for a set of drag bars with 4.5in risers and loved them. Look at a picture of the movie Easyrider and see the difference between Peter Fonda’s and Dennis Hopper’s handlebars.

Billet “teardrop” airfilters are a dime-a-dozen, same goes for oil-tank/battery covers. Doesn’t mean a whole lot. The oil-cooler is more of a Honda-ish give-away. Although I wouldn’t put it beyond Shelly to find that after putting on high-compression heads on her hog, and flowing all of it, she needed an oil-cooler.
Pretty standard neccessitiy when tuning big-bore long strokers.

Shelly would certainly have the fab skills to use what she considers the best parts from various manufacturers. Her bike is probably a subtle custom. A Frankenbike, if you will, that only real motorheads would be able to spot as such. To every one else, it’s just one more cruiser. Car guys do it all the time to biuld “sleepers”. Cars that look stock, but will eat your lunch for you and ask for seconds.

I can vouch for that. my cousins down in the NYC go racing. Then I saw what they drove, a honda civic, and a toyota corolla, both were high gloss red. I laughed for a few minutes, thinking that they were joking. Then they lifted the hoods… I don’t think there was a single stock part in either car…

How many one-hit wonders do you know of whose hit was the title track of a concept album, with cover art (which i knew about) and gatefold art (which i didn’t) by one of the top humour, satire and horror comics-and-everything-else artists?

I remember that Motorbikes, choppers especially , were more of a mainstay in much album cover-art.

Made me fall in love with the classic “long-fork” choppers BAD!
All my pocket-money (all weekly Fl 2,50) went into pictures and toys of them. Remember “Britains” -cast iron toy-motorcycles? It had the penultimate long-fork in it’s gamma. I saved like 4 months for it, became a regular Scrooge… this is the one…